Sonic Adventure


Developer: 

 Sonic Team

Publisher: 

 Sega

Players: 

 1

TV System: 

 NTSC

Accessories: 

 N/A

Style: 

 Adventure / 3D Platform



Sonic Adventure is no doubt one of the hottest games on the Dreamcast right now. Its stunning graphics, awesome tunes, and super fast gameplay is enough to mesmerize anyone. Well, at least that's how it seems right? We'll go in depth now to see why this game is so amazing.

Unlike the previous Sonic games, this game isn't based on one character. Its actually based on an additional five characters including Tails, Big the Cat, Amy, E-102, and Knuckles. Sonic's game is the longest, while the rest are about a quarter of of the length of Sonic's game. While you have to credit Sonic Team for adding something new to the series, maybe they should have left it as a Sonic-only game. Many of the other character games are very frustrating and boring. Big the Cat's being the worst of both categories. Getting around SA's world is very easy, your main "headquarters" is station square. That's where you will be when you want to get to the stages.

The graphics in this game are breathtaking. Breakup is rare in SA's huge game world. You really have to see Sonic moving at full speed in levels like Speed Highway and Emerald Coast, its just so amazing. Level design is just genius! Characters and stages are very colorful and contain a huge amount of detail. Check the Windy Valley stage and you'll see what I mean. The only annoying thing is the cars and civilians in this game. The cars look like plastic toy cars and the people look blocky and pointy. Also, the mouths of the characters don't move with the speech because they didn't bother to change the mouth movements when translating the game. These things don't hurt the fun of the game at all of course, I'm just nit-picking.

The gameplay is two ways. The characters are pretty simple and easy to control, but the camera really sucks. Although not as bad as the Japanese version, it still gets very annoying at some points. The camera has the knack of going behind walls and under floors sometimes, blocking your view of the character. It wasn't bad around the beginning in Sonic's game, unfortunately it gets horribly annoying with the other characters later in the game. It wont stop you from finishing stages, but it will frustrate you. The greatest feature of this game's gameplay is its speed. You will get at immensely high speed with Sonic, so be prepared for the ride of your life! Another negative is the *gulp* slowdown. Slowdown rears its head up often in this game. Not so often to be unplayable, but enough to still be a pain in the ass.

The sound is pretty good. The classic "cling" sound when collecting a ring is back and the other sound effects fit the game. Though the voice acting isn't that great, its not half as bad as games like House of the Dead 2. There were a lot of times I thought the sound effects were very cheap. Like when the wall of a cave burst's open and falls to the ground, it sounded like building blocks hit the ground with a lot of bass. There are other instances too, but I cant go through them all. The music in Sonic's game rocked in my opinion, but other characters in-game music like E-102 and Big the Cat just plain sucked. Also the music for the stages or environments you were in matched pretty well, but nothing to be acclaimed for.

This game isn't hard to finish at all, going through the stages and beating the bosses is a pretty easy task. Maybe even a little too easy for most. It took me 18 hours to finish the game, and do you know what the best part was? I enjoyed it immensely the whole time. Well, not counting Big's game :) Oh, and you really want to finish this game because boy, you are really gonna like what you get for finishing it. Can anyone say Super Sonic?

Final Word

Click here for Information about our Ratings System My conclusion is, if you get a Dreamcast, get Sonic Adventure.


Review By: Sean Lamma



[Click to expand] [Click to expand] [Click to expand] [Click to expand]




[Back]